The Day of Judgement has arrived! At 2pm on 29 November Lord Justice Leveson began to deliver his report into the culture, practices and ethics of the press. The report makes salutary reading for those involved in the dissemination of information via the printed or broadcast word. The behaviour of a small number of newspaper journalists in flouting the law has led to the biggest inquiry into the ethics of the press in history.

There is heart to be taken from the fact that his Lordship did not reach the conclusion that the press have no ethics: that's something. Nor is there any kind of intimation that the great bulk of reporting and publishing within the local and trade press, as well as the lighthearted sort of journals that pack newsagents' shelves, have been hacking phones, offering bribes to policemen or hobnobbing with politicians.

Lord Leveson said: "Not that it is necessary or appropriate for the press always to be pursuing serious stories for it to be working in the public interest. Some of its most important functions are to inform, educate and entertain and, when doing so, to be irreverent, unruly and opinionated.

"The BBC comments section on the story, however, is packed with individuals, most of them ill-informed, who talk about "the press" as if it were a single entity populated by hacks doing people down for the sake of it. What they mean, of course, is not the press; they mean what used to be called the gutter press – Private Eye's Street of Shame. What the BBC also pointedly fails to mention is that it, too, is part of the press.

The fact remains that a prurient press is only possible if it has a prurient readership. No newspaper would go to the lengths they do to pry into the private lives of anybody – celebrity or 'private' person – if they didn't think somebody would buy the resultant pressings.

Meanwhile, that august organ of the Law Society, The Gazette (also a part of the press, don't forget), got to the root of what its readers really wanted to hear about from Leveson. The part where he talked about costs!

It opens its report on His Lordship's report with the words: "A call for Lord Justice Jackson's proposals on costs to be introduced for defamation, privacy, breach of confidence 'and similar media-related litigation' appears in the Leveson report on the press published today."

• One of the biggest growth areas in the field of expert witness service provision has been the medical profession. When they have gone back to doctoring (could it be the cut in experts' fees?), they discovered the NHS itself has been stolen. Now they have formed a political party to try and get it back. NHS Action will contest 50 seats, including those of the Prime Minister, Health Secretary and Chancellor. What do we want?

Chris Stokes